


Marci Stahl is a Fabulous Bitch

by Orockthro



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: F/M, Female Protagonist, Kidnapping, Post-Season/Series 02, fandom 5K
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-20
Updated: 2017-05-20
Packaged: 2018-10-25 14:25:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10766082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Orockthro/pseuds/Orockthro
Summary: Marci’s intuition is fantastic. Just look at Foggy. She took one look at his ass in Intro to Tort and thought, “That boy will be a great lay.” Past his weird hair and his baggy clothes, and past Matt Murdock’s judgement, was shockingly good sex and an unexpectedly clever law student.She also thought to herself in Intro to Tort, “That boy is going to bring me trouble.”Like she said, Marci has fucking fantastic intuition.(Or, Post S2, Marci finds a mystery, has some great sex, and is a fabulous, fabulous bitch.)





	Marci Stahl is a Fabulous Bitch

**Author's Note:**

> For igrockspock. I hope you enjoy. I had a lot of fun writing Marci's voice, and your prompt was a delightful opportunity to write her. Thanks! :D

Marci’s intuition is fantastic. Just look at Foggy. She took one look at his ass in Intro to Tort and thought, “That boy will be a great lay.” Past his weird hair and his baggy clothes, and past Matt Murdock’s judgement, was shockingly good sex and an unexpectedly clever law student.

She also thought to herself in Intro to Tort, “That boy is going to bring me trouble.”

Like she said, Marci has fucking fantastic intuition.

“No fucking way.”

“Marci, I’m not asking you to, like, converse with him.” 

They’re lying in Marci’s bed (she has standards to go along with that intuition) on her 500 thread-count sheets, and Foggy is staring at her like she ate his kitten and is now trying to sue him for indigestion. Which, come to think of it, sounds exactly like a case she’d be able to win.

Foggy shifts a bit on one of her pillows and manages to avoid eye contact. “Just, you know... it would be great if you could walk by his apartment. He’ll know if it’s me, you know?”

“What? That doesn’t even make sense--”

“Please?”

“And what, see if the light is on? He’s blind. Look, Matt went off the rails, dumped you in court, and was a total jackass. Let him drown in the shitstorm of his own creation, and stop overfunctioning.”

Foggy sighs enormously. She really likes that about him (when she admits to having feelings of any variety, of course). His whole being telegraphs whatever is going on in his head. When he sighs, his entire body sighs in one big chest-heave. It’s not exactly shark-like behavior, but it works for him, in a weird sort of way. 

“You know that’s not what I meant, don’t get hung up on the lights thing. Just... borrow a cup of sugar. See if he’s okay. And ‘overfunctioning’? What does that even mean, anyhow?” 

What he’s doing right now, though, is working exactly none.

“Eat me out,” she commands, “and stop talking about Murdock while we’re having sex.”

*

The second worst part about being Marci Stahl, superstar, is that once something starts niggling at her, she can’t shut it up. It’s why she’s so goddamned good at her job, why she can juggle being beautiful, screwing Foggy senseless, hanging up on her Dad when he calls three times a week, and being the best lawyer to rock 5-inch heels this side of the Hudson. And why she helped Foggy when he came to her about Wilson Fisk and lost her job.

And it’s why she’s out here, in the cold, staring at the brick exterior of Murdock’s apartment building when she’d much rather be home nursing a pint of Ben & Jerry’s.

The absolute worst part of being Marci Stahl, superstar-- hands down right now-- is that Matt Murdock’s light  _ is _ actually on. And not in the ‘I have guests and am not actually a trainwreck of a man’ way, but in the, ‘someone is breaking into my apartment and there are loud crashes and I might be dying,’ sort of way. She stares up at his building from the street, and swears.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” She hates it when Foggy’s right. She hates it that she even came out here in the first place, and she hates it even more that she’s going to have to fess up about it, too. 

It’s cold. It’s nearly ten o’clock, and while Hell’s Kitchen isn’t exactly a huge part of New York, it’s still going to take Marci a million years to get back to her own apartment, shower, and finish the pile of work before she has to go into the office tomorrow. So she does what any sane, self-respecting New Yorker would do: she calls 911 and gets the hell out of there before she gets shot. She doesn’t stick around to watch the sirens descend.

*

Hogarth, Chow, and Benowitz is a stellar place to work. They appreciate Marci, more than Landman and Zach ever did, and Marci’s office is a gleaming box of perfection that showcases what a gleaming work of perfection she is, too. On any given day, she loves the shit out of her big glass walls and the sparkling, reflective steel that’s everywhere. She’s got two mirrors in her office. She likes herself, what can she say. 

Today, though? She could do without the visibility.

“There’s a cop in your office,” Pam half-whispers when Marci makes it in, finally. Her perfect hair and her piping hot cup cappuccino do not make up for this. 

“For the Renalde case?”

Pam bites her lip. “No. For you.”

Detective Mahoney, it turns out, is a patient man. He’s been here since nine, admiring the interior of her office. It doesn’t look like he’s tried to get on her computer or into the little desk of files she keeps in the back corner, but he’s a Hell’s Kitchen cop, even if he’s one of the ones who escaped the dirty-cop-round-up, so she taps her keyboard and confirms that the computer is still turned off. 

“Mahoney, right? Foggy’s talked about you.”

She likes catching cops off guard. Most of her cases don’t involve detectives-- she specializes in the more white collar cases that usually make it to attorneys long before law enforcement cares-- but Marci has never left a skill unhoned. 

This time, though, it doesn’t work. Mahoney smiles politely at her, unfazed. “And you’re Marci Stahl. You called in a robbery in progress last night.”

Marci blinks. She’s not like Foggy Bear. A blink is the biggest tell anyone is ever going to get from her magnificent face. 

“Is that what this is about? Yeah, I did.” God she hopes Murdock isn’t dead. Foggy’ll cry and maybe puke, and she likes him-- a lot-- but she hates it when men cry. Makes her have feelings, and she hates having feelings.

“Can you tell me about the incident?”

She studies her nails. They’re perfect, of course, and gold. “Murdock’s light was on and it didn’t sound like he was having a rave voluntarily. I didn’t stick around-- I was just in that part of town for my mani-pedi. Your turn. What happened?”

Marci decides Detective Mahoney is a decent man when he writes down “mani-pedi” in his little cop notebook, folds the cover shut on it, puts it in his pocket, and says, “We both know you were there because of Foggy Nelson, but I’m going to ignore that. Matt Murdock is missing, and his apartment has been ransacked. We’re not ruling anything out.”

Marci doesn’t listen to much more of his speech. Tuning out babble is a skill she honed early in law school, surrounded by mind-numbingly boring men with high opinions of themselves. She deploys it in courtrooms gone awry, and on detectives who are feeding her lines with equal bored decorum. 

“That’s nice, detective,” she interrupts. He looks tired. There are dark smudges under his eyes that read like long nights. She can use that. “And what am I supposed to tell Foggy? His ex-best friend flew away? Give me the deets. Not ruling anything out means you-- officially-- have jack all. But off the record, give me something. Or I’ll sic Foggy on you, and you’ll have to deal with him calling you up every forty seconds.”

He studies her for a minute, takes a single, steady breath. “Off the record. Meaning you tell Nelson, and then you shut up?”

“Cross my heart,” she says, which is easy to say, since she readily admits to everyone that she doesn’t have one.

“I’m pretty sure Murdock got involved in something he shouldn’t have, and someone took him. His place was trashed, and I mean *trashed.* And there was blood.” 

“Taken.” Mahoney didn’t say ‘kidnapped.’ Kidnapped people are ransomed and sometimes get to live. Taken people? Taken people are sometimes ‘taken’ in carpet rolls and shoved off piers.

“Have a good day, Ms. Stahl. Please call if you remember any other details.”

*

Foggy doesn’t take it well. 

“I need to go over there, I need to go over there right now.”

In his defense, she probably should have texted him, not waited until he came over for make-out time to dump that load on him.

“Come on, Foggy, what are you going to do? The cops are investigating it-- the good ones. You can call Mahoney in the morning--”

Foggy half shoves her off as he rockets into a standing position.

“You don’t understand, Marci. I need to go. Now.”

And he leaves. He puts on his coat and his shoes and leaves her in her perfect apartment, alone.

“Fuck.”

She sinks back on the bed, and debates between a solo orgasm and following the fantastic ass she spotted all those years ago out the door.

*

She finds him sifting through Murdock’s ruined apartment. He’s lifting up what at one point was a nice king sized mattress-- now just a collection of springs and shredded padding, with two broken pieces of wood sticking out the side-- and heaving it against the wall, like he’s trying to tidy. 

The place is bad. Every cabinet door in the kitchen is opened, contents dumped onto the floor and smashed. Fridge bashed in and tipped over, and Murdock’s sparse furniture has been slashed with what looks like a sword or five.

Marci’s seen weirder. Nothing quite like aliens raining down from the sky over New York to change your perspective on ‘normal.’ 

“You know, this is probably still a crime scene,” she says, in lieu of a hello. Or, god forbid, condolences.

“Brett gave me the all-clear. I called him on my way here.” 

He’s not looking at her. Foggy Nelson’s nonverbal cues don’t need a lot of translation: he’s pissed at her. Fine. She can handle that. He’s pissed at her a lot-- it’s practically a facet of their relationship. She shudders. She hates that word, ‘relationship.’ It’s like clingwrap in her mind.

“What are you looking for? Clues?”

Foggy stands up straight, and Marci knows she’s gone too far. 

“You know what? For a moment, I thought maybe you had a heart. That maybe you weren’t just a total bitch.”

“Aw, you wound me, Foggy Bear. What do you want me to do? I can’t reach into my magic hat and bring Murdock back for you. And even if I could, he’d still be the asshole who left you in front of a courtroom on your own, with a case hand picked-- by Murdock-- to crash and burn. The facts,” she says, with the same voice she used to whip his ass in their first mock trial together, “are the facts.”

He lets go of the edge of the mattress, and it collapses down into a folded mass, groaning as it falls. 

She knows she’s too far in, but there’s blood in the water. She can’t stop now, even if she knows she should. “And for the record. I *am* a total bitch. But I am not *just* anything.”

Foggy’s quiet for a minute, and Marci questions why she came at all. She ought to have just opened the $300 bottle of wine Jeri gave her a few weeks ago for her work on the Plymouth case, put on some good music, and had herself an orgasm or two. 

But no. Instead she’s here, watching Foggy sift through the wreckage of Mudock’s life, slowly growing more pissed off. She huffs. It’s not a bad analogy for Foggy’s life in general.

When Foggy does finally speak again, it’s quietly, and with the powerful, careful words of a very good lawyer. He’s not just a good lay, he’s the lion’s share of why Murdock and Nelson, Attorneys at Law, got off the ground, let alone survived in the big cold world for as long as they did. She forgets that, sometimes.

“Matt has some shit in his life that I can’t talk about,” he says, and he apparently decides that the bedroom has nothing more to offer, and he walks to the lumpy brown pile of stuffing and scraps that used to be a sofa. And he sits down on it.

“Ew, Foggy, don’t touch that--”

“Just shut up, okay, Marci? Just... for a minute.”

Marci presses her lips together. “You know if you were anyone else, I’d walk out of here. Nobody talks to me like that and stays a part of my life.”

Foggy smiles at her, tired. “If I were anyone else, you wouldn’t have come. Look... Matt got mixed up in something, it started when he was a kid, and it’s complicated. And it’s not my story to tell. But I think that’s what happened here.”

Marci refuses to put her perfect ass on any of the garbage floating around Murdock’s apartment. She wouldn’t have deemed it acceptable when it wasn’t trashed, and she certainly doesn’t deem it acceptable now. So she stays standing and watches Foggy’s face in the ever-changing LED light of that god-awful billboard outside the window. It casts his face in a nightmarish caricature of red and white and green. All of Murdock’s lamps are smashed, so it’s all they’ve got in the dwindling light. 

“Ninjas.”

Foggy looks at her, eyes comically wide. “What? How did-- what are you talking about?”

“You know I’m not actually an idiot, right? I talked to Karen.” At Foggy’s still-wide stare, she rolls her eyes. “You know, Karen Page, your old secretary, the one who is now drinking too much and writing mediocre articles for the New York Bulletin? We spoke, using words, which is something you at one point were capable of. Her apartment got trashed by, and I quote the woman who is now a columnist, ‘a random pack of roaming wild ninjas.’ ” 

“Right. That.”

Oh yeah. That right there? That is the part of Marci’s intuition that, years ago in Intro to Tort, warned her that Foggy Nelson, great ass and all, was going to get her into trouble.

“So you know what’s going on, and you’ve decided not to tell me. That’s fine, I don’t actually care about Murdock.” She does care, even if she hates that she does, about the crushed look on Foggy’s face when she says that. “But you haven’t told your honest-cop friend Detective Mahoney, who is handling your missing ex-best friend’s case?” She lays in all her best sarcasm. Like the wine she isn’t drinking tonight, it’s expensive, smooth on the tongue, and cultured. 

“It’s not my-- I can’t tell you, okay. And I can’t tell Brett. I can’t tell anyone, and it’s awful, okay? Not telling anyone is so, so freaking awful.” 

She shrugs. “Fine. I’m going home. I hope you find what you’re looking for, Foggy Bear. You know my number. Don’t get murdered by this ‘pack of roaming ninjas.’ Or whatever.”

*

She drinks half the wine, fucks herself, and falls asleep.

When she wakes up, Foggy hasn’t texted her. She goes into the office even though it’s Sunday afternoon, and spends a few hours prepping for the court date she has on Tuesday. She’s second chair for Jeri, and she needs to make sure her already fabulous game is fully on-point. 

There are a few other lights on in the office, but not Foggy’s. Not that it’s too surprising. He’s a good lawyer, and he puts in the hours he needs to as a junior attorney. But he doesn’t bleed for it like some people do. He isn’t hungry for it, not like Marci is. She’s more than okay with that; it means he’s less competition. He’s talented enough that he’ll progress alright without the drive, but he won’t rocket up the ladder. Not like she is. Acting as Jeri Hogarth’s second chair is nothing to sneeze at, and she’ll be Marci Stahl Fabulous Bitch come Tuesday morning, hell or high water be damned.

She gives in after the sun sets and orders take out from the place that doesn’t know her name yet. Unlike the takeout that Foggy likes, this comes pre-portioned, from a place whose stars are not for decoration, but awards. She eats it, drinks the other half bottle of wine. 

When Foggy still doesn’t text her, she dumps the leftovers in the trash, tips the wine bottle upside down to drain in her sink, and dials the NYPD from memory.

“Detective Mahoney, please. I don’t care if he’s on duty, find a way to put me through.”

He is, which makes things more expedient. “Detective, it’s Marci Stahl. What do you know about ninjas?”

*

Mahoney meets her at a café a few blocks north of Murdock’s apartment that’s open late. Marci bundles up this time and goes to meet him with perfect hair and a Burberry coat. 

“What do you know?” he asks her. He’s got a cup of coffee that she can tell from smell alone is a simple black drip. 

She waves him off and doesn’t answer until she has a cup of coffee in her own hand-- almond milk cappuccino, half caff. 

“Just what any brilliant, young, beautiful lawyer knows. Oh, and also that Murdock’s apartment got trashed by weirdos with swords, and that Hell’s Kitchen is apparently beset with wild ninjas.” She shrugs and takes a sip of her coffee. It’s not entirely shit, but it’s not good, either. “That and, according to a source I have, Murdock might have a history with them.”

He looks over his shoulder, and Marci has to say, if she’s about to star in a noir, Detective Mahoney is one of the better looking options she’s seen. “Let’s take a walk,” he says, and yup. Marci is definitely about to star in a noir. 

“The ninja thing is weird as hell. This is all unofficial, by the way,” he tells her once they get away from the smattering of people pressed face-first into their laptops at the coffee shop. It’s cold enough, and late enough, that there isn’t the usual endless mass of humanity on the sidewalk tonight. Nothing is private in New York, but what they’ve got is about as close as it’s gonna get. “I thought weird was when half my co-workers got taken in on corruption charges, or maybe when Iron Man dropped out of the sky after the aliens, but the ninja thing is making my life way harder. They just disappear. It’s like they’re not even really there.”

“Yeah, except they kill people.”

Mahoney gives her a dour look. It’s tempered by the fact that his nose is turning a touch red in the cold. “Except that. I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t desperate for leads. Tell me you’ve got something.”

Law school, and the subsequent bar exam, drilled one thing in particular into Marci’s head: confidentiality is king. Fuck that up, and you’re out on your ass. Marci’s ass is too fine to wind up on the street, and her tastes are far too expensive to be satisfied at some hack firm that would have her after her name got dragged through the mud. She’s not Foggy, after all. 

“I have a source, like I said. Murdock’s childhood may have intersected with these wild packs of invisible non-existent ninjas.”

“Sure. What else did Foggy tell you?”

“My source who I did not in any way, shape, or form identify--” Oh god, she realizes suddenly, holding a half empty and half shitty cappuccino. I’m starting to sound like him. “Didn’t give me a lot to work with. But my source also isn’t returning my very amazing booty calls. Normally I wouldn’t care, of course...”

They stop walking a block north of Murdock’s apartment. Mahoney turns and pulls her into a nasty alley that houses three garbage bins and a tipped-over recycling. “Seriously? You want to chat here?”

He doesn’t bother answering, and Marci figures that’s actually a pretty good technique against her. Good thing Foggy never learned it. 

“You don’t think Nelson’s been taken, or you’d be a lot more concerned.” She shrugs. Probably, but she hardly wants to let onto that. Heaven forbid her reputation get tarnished. “But you do think he’s over his head. And maybe on Murdock’s trail.”

She shrugs again. “All I know is what my source told me. Ninjas. Murdock. Past. I’m starting to feel deja vu here.”

“Fine. Go home, I’ll put out a discreet APB on Nelson and take another look at Murdock’s apartment.”

“Oh, hell no.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m Marci Stahl, not some witness you can badger. I don’t come and go when called.”

“And I don’t bring civilians along into situations that could become dangerous.”

“Lucky for you, I have no interest in meeting this wild pack of ninjas. But I do have some interest in making sure Foggy doesn’t meet them, either. So let me help.”

*

It turns out that for a boring blind guy with a dead dad and a missing mom, information on Murdock is scarce on the ground. Or the internet, as it were.

“Oh, you know us nun-types,” a woman named Sister Mary says to Marci over the phone on Monday morning. “We’re not much for computers. But I remember dear Matt, of course. Most of us do. Poor thing, had such a hard time of it here.”

Marci blinks, half surprised. It wasn’t supposed to be this easy. She ‘mhmms,” into the phone, not actually caring about ‘poor Matty,” The light in Foggy’s office is still off, and as she cranes her neck, it doesn’t look like any of his files have been moved, and the usual tell-- the box of cereal he keeps ‘hidden’ by the leg of his desk-- is undisturbed. 

“That’s nice, Sister Mercy,” she says, and ignores the woman as she’s being corrected. “I’m calling because Murdock might be mixed up in something related to his past. I’m his legal council, you see, so anything you tell me will be kept strictly confidential between me and my team.”

“I don’t know what on earth poor Matt could be mixed up in. He hardly spoke, you know. Totally non-verbal for most of his time here.”

Marci doesn’t care about Murdock. She doesn’t. She’s mad at him, and will be for a very long time, for how he’s treated Foggy. She’s a bitch, but Murdock was supposed to be his friend, and he screwed that up, royally. But this? Doesn’t sound like Murdock at all. Murdock is nearly impossible to shut up, sometimes, and when he and Foggy get started in on something together, they’re an unstoppable pair. 

It’s annoying, but the half-melted corner of Marci’s heart also calls it endearing.

“Most of his time? That changed?”

“Oh yes, after the specialist. They spent hours and hours and hours outside our walls, and it did Matty wonders. He actually sat with us at mass, after that, and didn’t scream.”

“Can you give me the specialist’s name? I know it’s been several years, but--”

“Oh, I’m sorry dear. He never gave it to us. And when he left, he just disappeared. Practically into thin air!”

“Wait. I’m sorry, what? You never got his  _ name _ ?”

Apparently the Marci Stahl patented sarcasm is detectable, even to nuns. “We followed the lord’s guidance, young lady. And a boy who was tormented by the devil came back to us. That’s all the information I can give you. Except for a contact number. He did give that to us, should we have any more children come to us that were like Matty.”

She grinds her teeth. “And may I have it?”

“Of course, dear,” the nun says, infuriatingly, and then proceeds to read out a number. 

Marci texts it to Mahoney, along with: _“Psble child mollester, or mebe ninja. No name. Foggy still MIA.”_

Mahoney calls her three hours later, when she’s halfway into a noodle dish from downstairs that’s peppered with the best hot sauce she’s had in weeks. “What?”

“That number? Traced it before calling. It goes to a phone booth, but the phone doesn’t actually ring there. It rings to a Chinese takeout joint in Hell’s Kitchen, one of the places we have an eye on under suspicion of money laundering.”

She slurps a noodle, and puts it as close to her phone as she can, just to be obnoxious. She kinda likes Brett; it’s how he’ll know she cares. “So that’s not suspicious at all.”

“Guess what I found when I sent a black and white to check that phone booth out?”

“Does it start with ‘nin’ and end with ‘ja’?”

“Got it in one. Who was this nun, again?”

*

Sister Mary-- who takes offence to being called Mercy more than twice, and once she sees that Marci isn’t some cute little church-mouse or a pro bono lawyer, takes offence at Marci’s entire being-- lets them sift through what passes as records in the front office of Saint Agnes’s Orphanage.

“Jesus--sorry. But holy fuck, you get this past the IRS?” One pile of check stubs is marked, “incomings,” and another rat’s nest of receipts details repairs to the roof, a new concrete pour for the cracked steps, and someone’s pretty nasty Diet Coke habit. The file cabinet filled with the kids who lived here years past is just as bad, with files out of order, missing, and empty. By a small mercy, Murdock’s file is right where it should be. 

Brett glares at her, but Sister Mary has decided that Marci doesn’t exist, and Marci is entirely ignored.

“I’ll leave you to it,” she says. And then, very sternly, “We have cameras, you know. Tony Peters from the Wednesday mass installed them last week, after the break in.”

Mahoney sighs. “The break in?”

“Oh yes. Nothing was taken, as far as we can tell. But it’s so hard to know for certain. They broke the lock on the office here,” she says, and points to the knob that does, in fact, look a lot newer than the rest of the place. “And riffled through everything. Probably looking for money, poor things. Of course they didn’t find that.”

“Of course not,” Marci says dryly. “But I have a feeling they got what they were after.” She waves Murdock’s file. It’s no longer a happy coincidence it was easy to find. Someone else found it for them first.

She skims it. Blah blah, dead dad. Blah blah blind. Nothing about ninjas, or anything interesting at all. The “specialist” only gets a passing note, a scrawl on a torn steno pad shoved into the back of the file that reads, “Stick contacted; not black sky.”

“Whatever, this is useless.”

Brett grabs the file before she can shove it back into the hot mess that the church calls organization. Cleanliness is next to godliness, but apparently not order. “Yeah, who is the detective again?”

“Whatever.”

Marci ditches after that, takes a taxi back to the office, and calls Foggy again. She doesn’t leave a voicemail when the ringing finally stops-- she’s not that desperate-- but she does send him a series of text messages. She wouldn’t dream of sounding concerned about him. But she might slip up, just a little, and throw in a few too many emojis. 

She spends the rest of Monday glaring at her silent phone.

*

Tuesday morning’s court date comes, and Foggy’s office is still empty. Marci throws her hair over her shoulder when she walks over to Jeri Hogarth’s office, Prada leather briefcase in hand. This bag was born for Marci, and Marci rocks the look. 

Jeri looks her up and down, and frowns. “You worried about this?”

“Not in the slightest,” Marci snaps back. “We’ll crush them under our perfect, perfect shoes.”

“Sure. Just keep your head. And tell your boyfriend if he doesn’t show up tomorrow, he’s fired.”

So it wasn’t the greatest start to her first chance to be Jeri’s second. But Marci does rock it, and they do crush the Plymouth case into glittering crushed glass, and by the time they’re filing out of the courthouse and pouring into taxis, Jeri is smiling her shark-toothed, dangerous smile.

“Good job, Marci.”

“Any time, Jeri. Any time. And I mean that, too.”

She checks her phone in the taxi, already expecting the ‘no messages’ icon to be a dead space at the top of her screen. So when it isn’t there, when instead there’s a little unopened envelope icon, she doesn’t hold her breath. It’s probably her fucking dad again. The guy wouldn’t know a clue if it walked out into traffic. 

But it’s Foggy.

_ “Sry for silence. Have Matt. Talk later.” _

“Oh hell no, you don’t.”

She calls him, and he hangs up on her. So she texts. And texts. She hopes his cheap, wonderful ass has a decent phone plan, because she’s going to fucking fill his inbox until his sorry excuse of an explanation magically explains itself. 

_ “WTF, FOGGY.” _

_ “Mahoney put out APB.” _

_ “MISSING ***HOLE AND FRIEND. HVE U SEEN? PSBLY W NINJAS.” _

_ “SRSLY.” _

_ “Call me, or i wont fuck u for a month.” _

Eventually she gives up and calls Mahoney. “Apparently they’re alive.”

*

It’s Karen the mediocre writer nee secretary nee who-fucking-knows-what who ends up being the most helpful in all this. Marci texts her: _“where du ur boys hole up whn running frm ninjas?????? >:’C”_ and they end up meeting for drinks late on Tuesday at the shitty bar Foggy’s taken to her a few times. Josie’s, or something. It’s completely disgusting.

Karen looks like shit. Dark circles are under her eyes, and she is a little more intent on her whisky than a person in a shitty joint like this ought to be. Normally Marci would revel in comparing herself to anyone starting in on a downward spiral, but it feels like a cheap shot. 

Marci’s intuition? Doesn’t have anything good to say about the direction Karen’s headed.

“Sweetie, you look like hell.”

Karen’s mouth quirks up in the corner, and maybe it would look like a smile, but Marci’s seen this girl smile. This is pathetic. 

“Thanks, Marci. Always good to know you care.”

“Oh, I don’t. Not a bit. But Foggy likes you, and because I’m obviously way hotter than your string-bean Midwestern self, I don’t see you as a threat. And since he apparently isn’t currently murdered or kidnapped by ninjas, I don’t want to see him cry when you inevitably destroy yourself. So get it together.”

Karen puts down the drink and stares at the counter. “That was a terrible pep talk.”

“It wasn’t one. Now where’s Foggy at?”

*

Foggy is dozing upright when Marci finds him, atop the saddest looking folding chair she’s ever seen. He’s in his old office. The last month has done no wonders to it, but Murdock must still be paying the bills on it, since the light switch turns on when she slams it with her fist.

“Nelson!”

Foggy jumps upright, and there’s a crash from the office behind him. Ah, Murdock is here, too, then. Good, she’s got a few things to tell him.

“Oh, god, Marci, you nearly gave me a heart attack!”

“Oh, I did? Oh, you poor thing. I covered for you to Jeri fucking Hogarth, so don’t you dare talk to me about being put through the wringer.”

He blinks. “Right. Work.”

“Yes. Work. Work I got you by sticking my neck out. If you turn out to be a dud, my word looks bad, Nelson. You may not care about your career, but I sure as hell care about mine. Your ass better be in your seat tomorrow, or I can kiss goodbye to ever being Jeri’s second chair again.”

He smiles. “You were her second?”

Of course that’s when Matt Murdock emerges from the back office. He looks like he’s done ten rounds with the Punisher, and lost.

“And you, what the hell do you think you’re doing, dragging Foggy into this? I don’t care who screwed you up as a kid--”

“Marci, this isn’t--”

“Shut up, Nelson. Got it, Murdock?”

Matt Murdock looks vaguely in her direction. He doesn’t have his usual disarming smile on, or his sunglasses, or even a suit jacket. He’s in an extra large t-shirt that she recognizes as Foggy’s, and it swims on him. “I know.”

“Good.”

Foggy finally quits the folding chair and stands up. “Not good! No. Uh-uh. We talked about this. Sorry, Marci, but you don’t know what’s going on, at all, and you can’t just march in here and act like--”

But Murdock, despite it all, didn’t graduate top notch without reason. He’s never met a verbal argument he didn’t want to take on, even one like this where if he had any sense, he’d shut up and slink out the door. “No, Marci’s right. I... got into trouble due to my own actions. And my past. And you were almost hurt because of it. Again.”

Marci files that ‘again’ away for a later conversation with Foggy. 

“You know what, I don’t care.”

They stare at her. Or, Foggy does. Matt tries. 

“I’m not here to be your divorce attorney. Figure yourselves out. Foggy, I’m not covering for you to Jeri again, either show up tomorrow or don’t. Murdock, I’m glad you’re not dead.”

And she leaves.

*

Marci Stahl’s intuition is fucking fantastic. And sometimes that fucking sucks.

Like walking into work on Wednesday morning and knowing without even having to look that Foggy Nelson’s desk is cleared off, and he’s nowhere in sight.

“Stahl.” Jeri’s voice is crisp and impossible to misplace. Marci looks over her shoulder and, yup, there is the woman she will someday be better than, standing in a perfectly tailored pant-suit and looking hot. If Marci were into that sort of thing.

“Jeri. Sorry about Nelson. Fucking men.”

It’s the right thing to say. Jeri doesn’t laugh-- sharks don’t-- but she does crinkle up at the corners, just a little bit. 

“Pam has his last check, if you want to take that to him.”

Marci shrugs. “Make him come in for it. I’m not his fucking mom.”

That’s also the right thing to say, because Jeri Hogarth actually smiles a half little smile around the corner of her mouth. Her eyes stay dead-cold, though. Marci needs to figure that out, because it’s terrifying. 

“You’re off the Dartmund case.”

“You can’t be serious. I know that better than anyone here.” It’s not indignation, it’s *fact.* 

Jeri straightens a little. In the glass offices, everything is so damned visible. She knows they’re being peered at by a dozen sneaking little rat attorneys and paralegals eager to learn the real scoop. 

“You’re off the Dartmund case. But ask me again next week.”

It’s an olive branch, and Marci takes it with a smile.

*

Foggy texts her Wednesday around lunch. 

_ “Sry bout evrthng.” _

She ignores it, and the next five texts. 

_ Srsly sry. _

_ Thx for helping Brett. _

_ Evthng ok now. _

_ U ok? _

_ Marcie? _

It shouldn’t surprise her when she goes home at seven to find Foggy sitting outside her door with a batch of cookies that, fuck the man, smell absolutely heavenly. 

“You have a key, you know.”

He gets up off the floor, the cookies balanced in hand, and smiles sheepishly. “I wasn’t sure I should ... well, you know. Yesterday wasn’t great.”

She rolls her eyes, palms a cookie-- snickerdoodle-- and opens the door to her apartment. Foggy trails behind her, looking like a lost dog.

“Sort yourself and Murdock out?”

He plunks down on her sofa, which is about forty times nicer than the sofa that currently takes up residence in Foggy’s apartment. That sofa is one of the --many-- reasons she refuses to go over to his place. That and literally everything about it. And, he looks good on her sofa. 

“Yeah. We’re going to open our firm back up. I think it’ll be better for... for everyone.”

“For Matt.”

He sighs and closes his eyes. “For me, too. I’m not like you, Marcie. The big glitzy law firm life isn’t what I want. I didn’t want it when Matt and I were interns at Landman and Zack, and I don’t want it now. I appreciate you going out on a limb for me, and I hope I didn’t screw things up for you, but, Nelson and Murdock feels right. And Matt does need me, and that’s okay, you know? I’m just... I’m not like you.”

She smiles, wanly. She knows. She’s known that from the get-go. “No shit, Foggy Bear. I’m 110% of perfection, no one is like me.”

He laughs a little, and his eyes are red and puffy, like he might start crying. Or that he had been before she showed up. She realizes, surreally, that he’s rehearsed this. That this is his pre-breakup speech, laying the groundwork for her to cut him off for good. 

She leans over and puts a cookie in his mouth.

“But since I don’t want to date myself, I don’t see the problem. I think your pathetic law career is the tragedy of the century--”

He laughs again, and it sounds even wetter. 

“But that’s your problem. And Murdock’s. I’m not your mother, or your nanny, Foggy. I’m not going to micromanage your life decisions. But just know, unless you start making loads of money on the side, we’re never sleeping at your place. I’d held out hope you’d move soon, but since that’s obviously not happening on the casserole payment plan you put your clients on, I refuse to fuck you over there. Ever. I’m pretty sure there’s an entire generation of mice living in the walls.”

They eat cookies on the sofa, and Foggy cries a bit, and Wednesday slips into Thursday, and their lives move forward.

Jeri does let her back on the Dartmund case after the week’s punishment slash probation is over, and when people talk shit about the weird long-haired lawyer they hired who quit within days, she rolls her eyes and joins them. She’s not about to commit career suicide over protecting Foggy’s honor or anything. She’s fucking Marci Stahl.

On Sunday night, when Foggy’s eating her out on her perfect bed, she says, “I was right about you,” right as she comes.

When he’s curled against her under the sheets, he asks, “Right about what?”

“I called it the moment I set eyes on you. You are a fucking great lay.”

Foggy cackles in big, ugly, perfect guffaws. “Marci, never change.”

She grins. “As if. I’m a fabulous bitch, Foggy Nelson. No one changes perfection.”


End file.
